King Lear is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s great masterpieces, and it is gratifying that even fifteen-year-olds can be sucked in by it. The play depicts the tragedy of the eponymous King Lear, ruling in the misty pagan past. Lear suffers terribly after he foolishly gives up his kingdom and is abused by the two daughters he appoints his caretakers.
In all of his suffering Lear is constantly asking why? He is “a man more sinned against than sinning”; the abuse he receives seems well in excess of any dessert that he could have ever merited. It is a poignant question, made all the more sharp by the fact that Lear is a pagan king. He cannot make any sense of why he suffers.
In this sense, Lear is a quintessentially human figure—the question of why we suffer has been asked for all of history. However, Lear reveals an element of how the question is asked and understood that is relevant to our own age, and the play’s portrayal of the limits of pagan responses to suffering shows the opportunity for genuine Christian comfort.
The problem of evil is one that is well known, and much ink has been spilled to explain the suffering and spilling of blood. Many have put forward various explanations, and while they can be intellectually satisfying, they are not usually as helpful when the floods of life rise and we are casting about for whatever we can hold to. In contrast to rational answers, more comfort is had in the Christian account that God too has suffered and that our pain and tears are heard and seen and shared.
This comfort is denied to Lear. A pagan king, he can only view suffering as being portioned out by the capricious gods. That he is a pagan is immediately established in Act 1 Scene 1; in his wrath against his daughter Cordelia for her perceived lack of love, he swears
“By the sacred radiance of the sun,
The mysteries of Hecate and the night,
By the operation of all the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be”
He is invoking the gods, the fates, those who control destiny and order the affairs of men. This is not entirely unusual; Shakespeare makes constant reference to Jove rather than naming the Christian God, but throughout King Lear there are no priests, no friars, no hint of Christian influence. It is purposely pagan, a nebulous time in England’s past, and as seen above fate is in the hands of the implacable gods. Lear’s own capriciousness in his demands to his daughters and the sending away of his former favorite Cordelia matches the perceived whims of the divine—ineffable is the will of the gods who may at their whim cause you to rise or fall according to charted courses of their own.
Lear’s suffering is made more poignant by this knowledge that it is pointless and far in excess of any dessert. He can take absolutely no solace from it—while alone in the cold and rain, he has no one he can call out to with any hope. Abandoned by his treacherous daughters, he vents his rage to the elements themselves in a memorable speech in Act 3, Scene 2:
Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children;
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That will with two pernicious daughters join
Your high-engendered battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O, ho, ’tis foul!
Lear suffers at the hands of an entirely indifferent world, one dumb and bereft of purpose. At best it is an empty world which pelts him—the pure blank Nature that the perfidious Edmund swears as his guide earlier. Indifferent and mute to his suffering, the elements rage on with a mightier rage than Lear’s that is yet meaningless. However, a darker possibility exists; that the gods are fully aware of and take pleasure in the sufferings they see.
This idea is more clearly expressed by the suffering of Gloucester, a man who gives aid to King Lear when his enemies forbid it. For his commitment to good, Gloucester is betrayed by his illegitimate son and blinded by his enemies, abandoned on the road. Unknowingly speaking to his loving son Edgar, he describes the lot of mankind: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport.” The gods may take pleasure in their destruction of mankind, for no reason other than that it is fun. Our sufferings as their drama. No loving Christian God, no Christ, nothing beyond the blood and mud we see.
Thus, there is no Gospel hope present, no invocation of a good Lord. Only the whims of blind fate or cruel gods, who may or may not care about Man and his suffering. Narratively, this serves to keep Lear a purely tragic figure. His suffering is mixed from the fruit of his own actions and the undeserved intricacies of fate; it is his own fault and far in excess of what anyone watching could allow, as is almost all of the suffering in the world. As always with Shakespeare, there is a lesson for the times in which we find ourselves.
Our time is seeing a resurgence of “paganism”. While such undercurrents are never uncommon (people have wanted to try and revive everything from worship of Ares to Bacchus), there are now terminally online people trying to go to ancient and classical roots. Some seek to return to Woten and Thor in rejection of the ‘slave morality’ of Christianity. Others seek mysticism and connections with the moon (even if it does upset Apollo sometimes). Still others actually dive into the occult. While the growing rejection of materialism has led to encouraging growth for the church, it also means that people wander every which way like so many lost sheep.
In this moment of interest in reenchantment, the Christian testimony regarding suffering is one thing that sets it apart from pagan spiritualism. There cannot be comfort for suffering in paganism. At best it can be borne stoically as you attempt to detach yourself from the suffering that is going on. Lear tries to tread this path; in Act 3, Scene 4 he attempts to cease reflecting on his sorrows, saying “O that way madness lies. Let me shun that, / no more of that.” Yet stoicism fails him even as he tries to detach himself from his pains, leading to that ultimate detachment of the self, which is madness. The very next scene he holds his “trial” for his daughters, descending finally into the madness he had sought to avoid as the weight of his trials becomes too much for him. For there are things that we actually cannot bear—and things that cannot be borne will break us. The storms of life will bend and bend us until we break, and there’s an end to it.
What then is to be made of unbearable suffering? It is the quintessential problem, explored everywhere from “highbrow” works like Lear and Brothers Karamozov all the way down to a child crying out “why” when in pain. King Lear warns that paganism will give no satisfactory answer: death triumphs, and grief then takes what is left of our lives.
Yet while the problem of pain is not fully and rationally answered in Christianity, it is given a salve that paganism lacks. For when the Christian suffers, we are called to remind ourselves of the suffering of Christ. He also suffered, and indeed tells us that to follow Him will mean we shall share in his trials. For this reason, Lear cannot be a Christian king, for he would then have an out. His suffering could have some meaning—he suffers so he may participate in the suffering of Christ. The pain would not be removed, but it could be offered and transformed by the offering.
It is not, I will grant, a perfectly satisfying arrangement. When we suffer, we want to do so no longer, and cry out to God like a young child in pain. I suspect it moves perfect Love more than we can conceive of; the pain remains nevertheless. Yet if we can view our suffering as a part of our lives in Christ, we have a shelter in the storm, a lifeline we can hold on to to give purpose to what seems purposeless. That is all we need sometimes.
After confession in the Anglican service, the priest says “Hear what comfortable words our Saviour Christ saith…‘If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the propitiation for our sins.’” This use of comfortable is from an older meaning of the word, one more robust than its cozier connotation today. To comfort is literally to make strong, to console. It is indeed consoling to know that Christ stands as our advocate, a voice on our behalf even amidst the travails of the world. Lear suffers alone, but we suffer alongside Christ, who knows better than any our burden, having carried the cross. Can even suffering be made comfortable? In Christ alone it can be, and if we can seize and show that comfort, we shall be greater than the pagan kings of the earth.
Image Credit: Edwin Austin Abbey, “‘King Lear,’ Act I, Scene I” (1898) via Wikimedia.
